The Last Blade Priest

by W P Wiles

Genres: Dark Fantasy; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

An absorbing and original epic fantasy with rich world-building and a wry take on genre conventions from a Betty Trask Award-winning author

--

Inar is Master Builder for the Kingdom of Mishig-Tenh. Life is hard after the Kingdom lost the war against the League of Free Cities. Doubly so since his father betrayed the King and paid the ultimate price. And now the King’s terrifying chancellor and torturer in chief has arrived and instructed Inar to go and work for the League. And to spy for him. And any builder knows you don’t put yourself between a rock and a hard place.
 
Far away Anton, Blade Priest for Craithe, the God Mountain, is about to be caught up in a vicious internal war that will tear his religion apart. Chosen from infancy to conduct human sacrifice, he is secretly relieved that the practice has been abruptly stopped. But an ancient enemy has returned, an occult conspiracy is unfolding, and he will struggle to keep his hands clean in a world engulfed by bloodshed.
 
In a series of constantly surprising twists and turns that take the reader through a vividly imagined and original world full of familiar tensions and surprising perspectives on old tropes, Inar and Anton find that others in their story may have more influence on their lives, on the future of the League and on their whole world than they, or the reader imagined.

File Under: Fantasy [ Nightmare Crows | Scarred Altars | Broken Stone | Unlikely Elves ]

 

Read more

Release date: July 12, 2022

Publisher: Angry Robot

Print pages: 400

Sample

1

INAR

Stone was not alive, he knew. But it had moods, it had needs, it had desires. And it often wanted to kill him.

This morning it was a corbel that had murder in mind. It resembled a heavy stone beam, almost as tall as a man but only a couple of hand-breadths wide. Laid across the top of the wall with many others like it, it would help support a platform from where defenders could drop heavy objects and unpleasant substances on assaulting soldiers. This morning it was the heavy object that dropped, and Inar was playing the part of the unlucky soldier beneath.

The work team had been winching corbels to the top of the rebuilt wall since first light, and Inar’s heart had never stopped pounding. The equipment was inadequate and the men would rather throw away their lives than listen to a simple instruction. Twice, someone had nearly fallen from the wall; it was the Mountain’s work that they had not seen a dozen broken feet and two dozen smashed hands. What good is a mason whose hand is a bleeding bag of splinters? And men were so scarce.

Only half of these bastards could wield hammer and chisel with skill. But none of them, it appeared, could tie a straight knot. Long and heavy, the corbels needed to be lashed at both ends to avoid swinging dangerously on the rope or slipping from its grasp altogether. Halfway up the wall, one of the bindings on this corbel had slipped towards the middle of the stone, and it had begun to sag and swing. Inar ordered the man at the pulley-rope to raise his pace; he had to order Lott, standing atop the tower, to hold back, not to lean out into space to try to grab the swaying weight. Cursing had followed. The pulley creaked and groaned – a certain looseness had come into its actions over the course of the morning, and Inar now feared for its security.

Kneeling on the unfinished top of the wall thirty feet above Inar, Lott had managed to get his hand on one of the corbel’s bindings and was guiding it closer to the wall. The pulley block shuddered. Inar shouted at him, again, that he should leave it alone until it was above 

the top of the wall. As he did so, unthinking, he moved closer to the bottom of the wall, beneath the winch arm. And then he realised that, if the pulley really was weakening, the last thing Lott should do was let go – that would cause the corbel to swing out, away from the wall, greatly adding to the stress on the ropes and wooden wheels that were allowing it to temporarily defy gravity.

Lott let go. He had taken his eyes off the stone, and his mind off the job, distracted by something behind Inar. The corbel swung away from him like a battering ram. He lunged for it, almost following it into space, then, fearing it might swing back and strike him, he scrambled backwards onto the scaffold.

The corbel never swung back. When it had swung as far from the wall as the rope would allow, the pulleys and the crane-arm supporting them shattered in a starburst of splinters.

It moved so slowly. The corbel executed a lazy turn in the cool morning air, hardly really falling at all as far as Inar could see. But it was falling, trailing loops of rope – falling towards Inar.

Inar leaped backwards, an action that came entirely from the darkness of instinct. His heel struck something hard and he sprawled onto a pile of rubble, left elbow twisting underneath him with an ugly pain, and a hard point jabbing into his right shoulder with the force of a battle blow. He cried out, without words. The corbel hit the ground point-on with a deep, solid boom, and for an idiotic instant Inar forgot his own safety and that of his men and instead hoped for the safety of the stone, issuing a prayer to the Mountain that this well-carved block should not break. It didn’t, and instead impaled itself a hand’s-length deep into the soft earth, remaining drunkenly upright like an ancient menhir.

The pain from his shoulder snatched Inar back to attention, followed by the realisation that the danger was far from over. Again moving mysteriously slowly, the remnants of the pulleys and the crane-arm were breaking away from the scaffold, and for a leisurely moment of horror Inar feared that a chain of collapse might have been set in motion, that the whole structure atop the wall might simply unravel before his eyes, taking half a dozen men and at 

least a month of work with it. But it held as the timbers and ropes of the crane clattered noisily to the ground, planting a garden of broken timber around the fallen corbel.

Dust rose, and there was a beat of quiet. Inar tried to raise himself from the heap he had fallen into, wincing again at the pain – but he was not bleeding, and nothing was broken. Just pain, which Inar now felt the need to spread around.

“Lott!” he screamed. “What are you thinking?! You could have killed us!”

But Lott still wasn’t paying attention. Instead he was gawping out over the fields beyond the city, where the lane that led to the Lowgate wound between broken dry-stone walls and farm-folk tending to spring planting. Inar turned to look.

There were horsemen approaching, not in any hurry. At the head of the small, sedate procession was a League knight, who, Inar noted with surprise, was also a woman. Flanking her were a younger girl and an older man, and following them were four more League knights in armour, one bearing a standard from which fluttered a pennant: three cascades, in white, on a blue background.

Inar had never hated a symbol more.

“I didn’t think the League had a Queen,” Falde said. He had arrived at Inar’s side unseen.

“They’ve got classy whores,” Lott shouted from the top of the wall, and a few of the Stull men laughed, not hiding their nervousness.

“Mountain’s silent, Lott!” Inar barked. But he did not take his eyes from the Leaguer woman, and she did not take her eyes from his. Hopefully, she did not speak Mishigo. She wore the padded leather armour traditional to the lowlands, but worked to a much higher quality than Inar had seen in battle-dress: shaped subtly to her form, covered in embossed decorations, highlighted with hints of silver thread. Such armour of this kind that Inar had seen before was brown, its colour chosen by the cow, but this was deep midnight blue. It was an outfit that spoke of the highest rank or the most unimaginable wealth, but the woman’s dark brown hair was cut short, like a peasant’s. The girl beside her was pale and distracted, like a noble’s poorly daughter dragged from her sickbed for an afternoon’s ride. The older man was stout, dressed in plain city clothing all in black, and he frowned up at the wall.

“Inar?” the armoured woman asked in practised Mirolingua. “Inar, the son of Astar?”

Inar straightened, in an instant painfully aware that the visitor must have witnessed the deadly farce of breaking timber and falling stone seconds earlier. He was reluctant to lay ownership to this shambles, but the truth could not be averted.

“I am Inar,” he said. “May I ask…?”

The woman smiled. “I am merite Anzola Stiyitta, surveyor-general of the League of Free Cities. We are in the same trade, Inar.”

A woman, dressed as a warrior, who claimed to be a builder. Inar found he had little to say. “Oh?”

Merite Anzola dismounted from her horse in a single smooth movement, and walked across the rough ground of the filled-in moat towards Inar’s works.

“I saw the accident. What do you suppose went wrong?”

Inar bristled. He had no desire to chitchat with a Leaguer of any kind, but for this chameleon of a woman to start to advise him on his business was intolerable. “Well, what happened is, this gang of leather-wearing arseholes from the mudflats came and knocked down this wall, and we’re trying to rebuild it. Only we’re short on men, and money, and keep getting interrupted while we’re trying to work.” This raised a grunt of mirth from Falde, and from the wall Lott shouted agreement. Inar turned to glare at the apprentice, who suddenly found a reason to get his head down and start dismantling the wrecked crane.

“I know you don’t have any reason to love the League,” merite Anzola said. She did not appear to be offended by his words, maintaining an expression of sunny enthusiasm. But Inar could also see the rest of her party: the miserable girl, the surly man in black, the stern-faced knights. “You or any of your men,” Anzola continued. “The war was an awful affair, awful – one we did not seek, remember. But our nations are friends now, and this friend would like to assist you.”

Friends? Master and servant was more like it, Inar thought, or perhaps landlord and serf. He said nothing.

“I saw the mechanism you had set up,” Anzola said. She had passed Inar and was inspecting the tangled wreckage at the foot of the wall. “Multiple pulleys, so a single man can lift a great weight – it’s very intelligent. Your design?”

Inar felt trapped, or at least as if he was standing at the edge of a trap and a wrong step might trigger it. For all her cordiality, this woman was dangerous. He was dealing with a puzzle made out of snakes. They all had to smile and agree with the League, the whole land, but he knew how the King’s court felt about anyone who might harbour actual loyalty towards their conquerors, especially if that anyone was already under suspicion. “No. I read about it in a book. Nothing clever.”

“It was intelligent to look for a better way of doing things, and it was intelligent to apply this design,” Anzola said kindly. “We think alike, Inar. As it happens we use something similar on the docks at Pallestra.”

Think alike? That sounded neither accurate nor praiseful to Inar. “It would work better if I could forge iron parts. But iron is in short supply around here.”

Anzola shrugged. Nothing appeared to alter her pleasant mood, not even mention of the high price the League had asked in exchange for peace. “The demands of war, sadly.”

“War’s over.”

“One war is over,” Anzola said. “The next…” Still smiling, she turned away from Inar and began to walk back to her entourage. “Delightful to meet you, Inar. I look forward to seeing you again.”

If a party of Leaguer knights had ridden up and cursed at him, Inar would have been less concerned. It would fit in with how he saw the world. But for them to compliment and encourage him – that left him unmoored, and troubled in ways he could not describe. He watched as the noblewoman mounted her horse and spurred it back down the road, followed by the rest of her party, as grand a display as they had made when they approached. None of them looked back at him, apart from the pale young girl. She was frowning, mirroring his own

furrowed brow, as if he presented a puzzle, or a disappointment. Disturbed by her silent attention, Inar broke his gaze and turned back to his men.

“Show’s over,” he said. “Let’s get on with it.”

Mishig-Tenh: the name meant “land of the late dawn”. To the east and south of the kingdom, the Shield Mountains rose, a curtain of rock thousands of feet high, and the sun took its time to climb above their clawing peaks. The rays of dawn reached places to the west of Mishig-Tenh before the sun rose high enough to surpass the mountains and shine down into the kingdom itself. The breaking of day was always slow, and in the winter felt as if it might never come at all. It was preceded by a long hinterland of quarter-light and half-light, the shepherd’s night.

It was in this time that the king’s men came for Inar Astarsson.

When they had come for his father and his brother two years ago, they had been as loud as battle. They had broken in the thick wooden door of the keep even as servants rushed to open it. They had overturned every loose piece of furniture they saw, and dragged out Astar and Essian with curses and blows.

This morning, the chief builder never heard them enter. Inar awoke in a grey dimness to find Cilma, the Lord Chancellor, standing at the foot of his bed, watching, still. Behind, in the doorway, a cluster of armour and weapons and hard eyes.

“My Lord,” Inar gasped, scrambling to sit up. He felt as if a trapdoor had opened within his bed, the worst kind of falling dream. His bladder was full and he feared for his mastery of it.

“What do they want, Inar?” Cilma asked, as calm as if he were asking if the young man had eaten breakfast yet. Even without force behind it, the question slashed to Inar’s innards.

“What?”

“What. Do. They. Want.” The dark brown cloak at the foot of the bed stirred ever so slightly.

“

My lord,” Inar said. Any moment now the men behind Cilma would enter, and the next time he saw daylight of any kind would be at his execution. If he was lucky.

“Don’t make me ask again,” Cilma said, searching the room with his eyes, finding shadows that sharpened as the light clarified. “In the normal course, the second time and third time I ask a question, the man answering it is in great pain.”

“What do who want?” Inar said, somehow.

“You know very well who,” Cilma said. “The League.”

“I spoke briefly with the League Lady,” Inar said, almost babbling. He lacked a precise answer to Cilma’s question and felt that the least dangerous course was to give a full account of everything that had happened the previous day, as quickly as possible. “She didn’t ask for anything. She praised my work. I insulted her. She went on her way.”

Cilma straightened and ceased to look into the half-light, fixing his grey eyes instead upon Inar. The chancellor had lost his own son on the field at Halsk Trun. Even before then, he had been the most severe figure at court. But after, that severity was honed with a terrible quality – more terrible, even, than his unopposed power. He had nothing to lose. It was in every hard line of that granite face of his. Nothing to lose, and so he gave everything – a berserker in the service of a shaky crown, impervious to civility, uninterested in precedent, indifferent to blood.

Inar’s room occupied half of the second floor of the keep, separated from the other half by a partition of wood panels. Through the connecting door, Inar could see the soldiers waiting in the stair. He could hear the floorboards creak under their shifting weight, the scuff of their boots, metal notes of armour and weapons. At any time the word could be given, and in they would come. Cilma saw the builder’s eyes fixing on the men, and he waved at them to close the door.

Now that they were alone, Cilma continued. “When a plot is exposed, you arrest the plotters, naturally,” he said, and something about the way he said arrest made it synonymous with kill. “And you arrest anyone who knew about the plot, and failed to do anything about it, because they are little better than plotters. And you must arrest anyone who stood to benefit 

from the plot. Nine times out of ten, they knew about the plot as well. But then there’s that one time out of ten when the beneficiary of a plot is unaware – an infant or dunce whose half-witted relatives want to put them on the throne. Are they innocent?”

To Inar, this appeared to be a rare occasion when it was safer to not give an answer. He was certain that Cilma had an answer ready. The chancellor was not a man to weigh on the one hand this, on the other hand that. There was only ever one hand, and it always came crashing down.

“In truth, innocence doesn’t matter,” Cilma continued. “You arrest them. Benefiting is culpability enough. And it discourages others. There’ll be fewer willing to elevate their six-year-old nephew if they know that his innocent head will join theirs in the sawdust all the same. But, you know…” Cilma sighed, and in doing so seemed suddenly his true age, and capable of doubt, perhaps even fallible. “You know, sometimes you just want to arrest everyone, and you can’t. You have to stop somewhere. And that leaves the possibility that you’ve made a mistake.”

He crossed the room, running an eye over the few books piled on the writing-desk under the south window, the carvings Inar used to weigh his papers, and then looking through the window itself. Dawn, at last – the sun was over the Shields. Good strong light, the harbinger of a bright spring day. From that window, Cilma would have a view of the mouth of the Sojonost Pass. Inar’s keep stood on moorland above the valley – worse for planting, but fine for views. On a clear day, by the east window, you could see God.

“After the betrayal of Stull, we were thorough,” Cilma continued. “Your father confessed freely. Your brother knew of the plot, and as your father’s heir stood to benefit from any preferment. Guilty twice over. But you – both claimed you knew nothing, even when the question was put with considerable force. Your death set no example. Enough blood had been spilt. And you had the makings of a great builder. You were an ideal candidate for mercy.”

Inar swallowed, and put some words together. If the decision had been made, he did not imagine that there was anything he could say that would save him; but if it had not, he wished

to avoid condemning himself. “I will always be grateful to the crown for its mercy,” he said. “I desire only to be its loyal servant.”

Cilma smiled sourly – more a grimace than anything pleasant. “Hmm. And so you have been. But now the League have come, and they desire your service. Our filthy treaty with them means they can levy anyone they like, but for you they offer riches. Why is that, do you think?”

Inar could not give an answer. He was too surprised. But he did not get the chance to say anything, as Cilma swooped back across the room, moving fast and silent and certain, his countenance again terrible.

“Perhaps,” he said, his voice low and venomous, “it is the pay-off of a treacherous little bargain made by your traitor father? Which would make you a beneficiary of treason.”

Then, as if the effort of this threat had wearied him, Cilma sank onto the stool that stood by the work table. “Get dressed,” he snarled.

So this was it – the end. Arrest, and death. One always led to the other.

He could not make himself move. What did one wear to prison? Or to torture? It was an unnatural courtesy to be given the chance to dress.

Highly unnatural. A faint outline of possibility – too faint to be called hope – had formed.

“Where are we going?” he asked, daring.

“I am going nowhere,” Lord Cilma said. “You are going to serve the League.”

Inar blinked at him. “My lord, I hate the League,” he said, and he was not forcing a show of fealty. The words came easily.

Cilma shrugged, a distinctly un-Cilma thing to do. “So do we all. But when they are here, they rule over us, and they are here. You’ll need to pack for travel, too, and ready a horse. Warm clothes, furs, and whatever you need for sleeping in the field. You are going to Sojonost.”

“What?” Inar said. Only just past sunrise, and already the day had exhausted him.

“The League Merite is coming,” Cilma said. He shot Inar a look, one Inar had never seen before – one of confidence. “An impressive lady, yes? She has impressed our king. Consequently, you are a League levy now, young Inar. You’ll go with them and do as they say.”

“My lord, this is not…”

“You listen to me,” Cilma said. He leaned in, his eyes as hard as dungeon stones. “You will be in their service, but you work for me. The builder becomes the spy. You will tell me everything. What are they doing at Sojonost? What are their plans? Will there be another war? Are they moving against Miroline? I want to know every detail you learn, and you will be eager in your learnings, you will ask questions and pursue answers. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, my lord.”

Cilma looked away. “Perform well, and there’s a good deal to be gained. The restoration of a few confiscated holdings, perhaps; perhaps even a path to the title that was promised your father…” He turned back, and again the severity was there. “If, however, I detect disloyalty, either to the crown or to me personally, I may decide that I showed too much leniency when dealing with your father’s treason. Do you understand?”

“My lord.” The words all made sense to Inar, yes. But he understood nothing.

The morning had passed in a storm of preparation. Inar had two servants, an elderly couple who were the last remnant of his father’s household. He tried to reassure them that he was only going to Sojonost, and that he would be back soon, but they were unwilling to meet his eye, and clearly expected not to see him again. The lingering presence of Lord Cilma, executioner of their previous employer, did not help. It was the lord chancellor who gave most of the orders, with Inar hardly knowing what to say.

Later, waiting on the Stull road for the League to come, Inar felt giddy from the speed of events. Lord Cilma had insisted that they meet the League with some ceremony, so he and his men had stayed in attendance, and Inar wore his best cape. They made a handsome group, and Inar even felt a little proud of the kingdom and of himself. But most of the prestige 

emanated from Cilma, astride a magnificent black charger, straight-backed and wrapped in robes and black furs like a column of smoke. To either side were the armoured guards, one of whom bore the royal standard, which turned and folded on itself in the light spring breeze.

There was no sign of the League. They were organisers, Inar thought, devoted to clocks and reckoning, trying to put all the world in their ledgers. He had expected them to be early. But they were not. In the distance, smoke rose among the black spires of Stull, and Inar could make out the neat line of towers that marked the line of the new fortifications, and the flat-topped pyramid of the shiel. Behind was the tower of the citadel, on the scarp that formed the city’s northern boundary. Nearer at hand, between the city and their waiting-place, was the akouy shiel, where the dead were united with heaven, and around it wheeled the black specks of birds.

“Eyes open, ears open, remember,” Cilma said.

“Yes, my lord,” Inar said obediently. “But how should I report to you?”

“Where are all our men?” Cilma replied. “Levied by the League, that’s where. They are using Mishigo and Oriri labourers and mercenaries. There are loyal men at Sojonost, they will contact you.”

“If you already have loyal men at Sojonost, why do you need me to spy?”

“Besides your obvious wish to serve your king and prove your fealty?” Cilma said, with a note of danger. “Because, young Inar, this woman, this merite, is a big beast. One of the biggest, in the top half-dozen or so people in their whole government. And you’ll be working for her directly, not digging holes. That’s why. Goff! That is a royal standard, not a stick for knocking apples out of trees! Upright and steady, you imbecile!”

Few other travellers used the road while they waited – a small straggling group of old peasant women, who kept their heads down and steered a wide course around Cilma’s men; a young shaven-headed man who might have been taken for the cutpurse if he had not been wearing the black robe of an acolyte of the Mountain; and an old man steering an empty horse and cart away from the city. Of the fields on either side of the road, maybe one in four 

had been tended recently. The rest were choked with two summers of overgrown neglect, made brown and matted by the winter, now returning to tangled, useless life. Dry stone walls tipped into the filling ditches. A brick chimney stack rose from the weeds – the house it had warmed had collapsed or burned. Only the old worked the farms – the young men were in the mines and quarries, paying the League’s price for peace, or had been levied. Rightly, this road should be busy with farmers and merchants, heading south to Miroline and west to the League, and pilgrims heading towards the pass – but there was no one using it now, bar one underfed horse and its scruffy-looking rider.

They were familiar, that horse and rider. Inar squinted at them at they drew closer.

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes,” Cilma said, amused. “The League advised that you take an attendant, and really only one man was suited to the job.”

Inar stared at Cilma. Was he capable of pranks? He did not seem the sort. But an inscrutable joke was clearly being played.

“Only one man?!” Inar asked, still unable to believe his eyes. “I have my own servants…”

“Too old, wouldn’t you say, for a perilous journey into the mountains?”

“Falde…”

“Falde is needed here, completing your work, builder.”

“Any number of men…”

“All needed. But I found I could spare one.”

“Good morning!” Lott cried from the road.

The League approached with the same majesty as they had the day before, blue pennant fluttering, the merite Anzola leading the party beside a League knight standard-bearer. Behind her were the older man and the quiet, sickly girl. The remaining three League-knights brought up the rear. Lord Cilma had been wise – if Inar had been on his own, waiting at the side

of the road for this stately party, he would have felt shabby indeed. Even worse if Lott had been with him, slumped in his saddle, picking at his filthy nails.

The chancellor placed Inar in the service of Anzola with no more than a dozen words of basic courtesy. Then he turned and spurred his stallion back towards Stull, soldiers thundering behind him, one gripping the royal standard with white knuckles.